Sunday, July 21, 2013

Any gripes against
Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) are sniggling ones: For the amount of money
spent—and that bread is all on-screen—this is
about as perfect a giant monster vs. giant robot flick as you’ll find.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

When feisty Barbara
Stanwyck’s hard-as-nails, incredibly successful businesswoman is blinded by
love for the first time in her hardscrabble life, her selfish and immature
younger brother takes the opportunity to ruin her empire.

Sounds kind of
modern, right?

Well, it’s as close
to a “Douglas Sirk” film that Sam Fuller would ever come to: 1957’s Forty Guns.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Thermonuclear
heatwave meltdown in effect, but no
summertime-popcorn-Propaganda-Machine-brainwashing here at LERNER INTERNATIONAL,
no siree!

These five films are
thought-provoking and controversial, yet brush against the Genre Zone quite
successfully—after Blind Beast, we
look at the recently released Upstream
Color, the long-awaited follow-up to cult favorite Primer; then Larry Cohen’s 1977 exploitation biopic The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover,
best watched if you put yourself in a late-1970s mindset. We conclude with
reviews of lost early-1980s UFOlogy masterpiece Wavelength and its abducted aliens; finishing with Kuroneko, another Japanese film, with
bloodthirsty yokai seeking revenge.

Blind Beast (1969;
Yasuzo Masumura)WOW, what a film!

“Why can’t touching be an art
form?!?"

An insane blind sculptor
kidnaps a young model that he’s become obsessed with—in order to recreate the
“perfect “ female form in Yasuzo Masumura’s unique erotic horror masterpiece Blind Beast. The madman cries out, “A
new art form, by and for the blind!”—and he means it!